To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about the background and motivations behind writing ‘The Darkest Timeline’?

I think it’s fair to say that the idea of the apocalypse, the end times, or collapse has been very much an obsession for me for my entire adult life. I was born in 1980, so I’m kind of on that exact cusp between Generation X and the Millennials. Like probably a lot of people born around then, I remember my childhood as being very analog, and then from my 20s onwards, everything becomes digital and starts to accelerate.

In terms of my view of the past and of the future, it’s very much shaped by those two experiences. I don’t want to go off on too random a tangent, but like at university, I had a pager. If I tried to describe to somebody much younger than myself how a pager worked—if I wanted to message somebody urgently, I would find a phone box, put some coins into it, phone up the messaging service for their pager, transmit a short message over the phone to a human being who would then punch it out and put it into their pager. This person would then have to read the little thing saying “you have a page” and phone up to get the message, and then call me back at the number I’d given, which meant I’d have to be in a certain location. I’m not even sure if I’m describing it correctly now that I think about it. It seems so crazy, like something from a Philip K. Dick story.

Yet now, I have a small computer in my pocket that has access to every single bit of human recorded knowledge. I think to people born on that cusp, the acceleration of technology is very prevalent in our thinking and experience of the world. The dislocation that’s happened between the early promise of the internet to connect people and the divisiveness, misinformation, and assault on truth that has occurred as a result of internet culture—all this has happened in our lifetime. We’ve seen the collapse of things like the journalism industry; it’s much harder to make a living as a journalist now. It could be that in the near future, even the New York Times goes under. This gives me a particular framing of how I see the world, different from someone born in 1990 or the early 2000s who grew up with the internet as a normal part of life.

In the chapter ‘Zero Future,’ you mention our obsession with the abstract representation of apocalypse signals our inability to confront present realities. Can you elaborate on this critique and its relevance today?

My arguments about progress are definitely influenced by John Gray’s ‘Straw Dogs.’ In ‘Straw Dogs’ and other writings, he argues against the notion of progress. He calls the notion of progress one of the ‘secular heresies’—anything that’s a legacy of a storyline, theme, framing, or theory of history from the Judeo-Christian tradition. To him, anything with a teleological viewpoint is an archetype of the Christian story of creation and Judgment Day, life and the afterlife. Anything resembling that is a secular heresy.

Progress can seem measurable from a certain point in history, but that’s because humans have a short lifespan, so our frame of reference is a couple of hundred years. Gray argues that the belief in progress is no more valuable than the belief in heaven. He uses transhumanism as an example, particularly the notion of uploaded consciousness. The idea is that you can copy your personality and upload it to the cloud, but the cloud is stored on physical servers, which can be destroyed. The writer Ewan Morrison tweeted humorously about how if you did upload your consciousness, you’d have to experience adverts and interruptions trying to sell you products, because only the elites could afford the ad-free tier of consciousness uploading. In the book, I argue that it’s unlikely any promises of transhumanism would equalise society, given that those pushing these ideas are often technocapitalists.

‘The Darkest Timeline’ suggests we are already living in a dystopian reality. Bram, how does our current cultural and political landscape reflect this dystopia, and in what ways does it resemble the cyberpunk narratives of a high-tech, low-life future?

Well, cyberpunk was always a warning, you know it now exists in an aestheticised escapist form you can consume cyberpunk products that are themselves a form of escapism or catharsis to escape from the real world. I’ve talked a lot about how important I think cyberpunk is as a genre and I think the reason it’s important is that it emerged specifically in that time that we were talking about the top of the interview where technology was starting to shift and the writers who pioneered it really anticipated that shift. You know it’s a well-worn story but William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on you know a typewriter from the 1950s effectively so you know it’s he was imagining things like cyberspace and virtual personas and you know hacking and things like this long before those things actually kind of existed so it’s already kind of proved its prescience and it’s already reached a point where it’s been sort of hollowed out of you know of all of its original political content in some ways but I still think it’s the most important literature to understand the present moment.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Doomer and Doomerism these Concepts as I’ve seen on internet forums and YouTube channels like Low Budget Stories, DannyDank, and Prince of Zimbabwe, reflect a bleak worldview that resonates with many people in the 20s including myself as a former sort of I guess self-identified Doomer I’ve noticed that this culture is characterised by fatalistic attitudes and a fascination with global crisis expressed through such things as memes, art, edits, and music my question is do you see any antidote to these Doomer circles? despite their current individualistic and I suppose somewhat pessimistic outlook.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question I mean I think like anything that you know got named on the internet there’s like several versions of Doomer you know Doomerism whatever we want to call it like there’s kind of like Lol Doomer right there’s like Doomer memes and you know I’ve been you very much consciously putting Doomer memes out to promote this book. Doomer culture, including memes and dark jokes, is a coping mechanism for existential worries. Figures like Jem Bendel and Arne Naess propose deep adaptation, confronting climate collapse realistically. The issue with figures like Bendel and Naess is how easily their acceptance of societal collapse can be twisted into narratives akin to the backwards crank or the Doomsday Prepper. This duality encapsulates both my issue with and fascination for Doomer culture. When observing their preparations for infrastructure collapse and their contingency plans, the pivotal question always returns to why they foresee societal collapse. Without exception, they attribute it to impending threats like ‘the Chinese are coming’ or ‘Muslims are the problem.’ While I share some concerns of some of these people but it comes from a very different place.

What do you think of Mark Fisher’s ideas of imagining the future beyond capitalism and how does this concept relate to our current economic reality? Are we still following, at present, a traditional capitalism?

What we have now isn’t even really capitalism and looks less like it all the time. What we have is an emerging techno-feudalism. I think Yanis Varoufakis has spoken about this quite a lot, and in a sense, we’re still calling things like capitalism capitalism or democracy democracy when, in actual fact, there are some quite existential threats to even those concepts. Nick Bostrom is someone I referenced a couple of times in the book. He’s a philosopher who’s written some quite provocative papers about what the future might be like and what the nature of our reality even is. One of his papers is called the ‘Vulnerable World Hypothesis,’ and in this, he writes about surveillance, drone warfare, micro-drone technology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and all these kinds of potential society-changing inventions that we might be on the verge of.

He also talks about the fact that these technologies, as they proliferate and exponentially get more powerful, also get easier to use and easier to come by. So, what he ends up effectively proposing is a global government with no democracy and complete surveillance of every citizen. He says that at some point, the existential threat to human life is going to mean that freedom is the necessary cost of preventing extinction, of preventing horror. I don’t think he’s making that argument to say that we should have a unipolar world order with total surveillance. He’s saying that, at some point, because of the technological curve we’re going on, that’s going to be a better bet than what we have now. 

If we want to keep what we have now, even the vestiges of those things, of our way of life, of our values, if we want to conserve those things, if we want to preserve those things and carry them forwards, then we really need to think about what they mean and how they relate to technology. We don’t really have safeguards in place for any of the technologies that I talk about in this book. Whether it’s artificial intelligence, drone technology, or surveillance, these are all being weaponised against human beings already. Facial recognition—you could say, “Okay, well, in one country here we have good safeguards on it.” Whether we do or we don’t, let’s say we do, there are going to be other countries that don’t.

There’s a cyberpunk novel by Bruce Sterling called ‘Islands in the Net.’ It’s from 1988, and in that scenario, data piracy is only not forbidden in two or three countries, and as a result, those countries become the most powerful players. I think it’s things like that—we almost have a generalised faith that technology is going to be moderated and managed, that it’s going to be implemented in such a way that it won’t really change the way we live our lives, and that we’re in safe hands with it. I think we’ve got ample evidence over the past ten years that none of that’s true, none of that’s true at all. So, yes, we definitely live in interesting times, and I think Bostrom’s right that it’s going to be very hard to maintain some of the things that we think are fundamental to our ways of life. Particularly in privileged elite Western liberal democracies, those might become very, very hard to maintain in the face of what might be coming.

Your Pandora Dynamics chapter examines predictive models. What ethical dilemmas arise from trying to predict and shape societal outcomes?

Bostrom is one of a number of people involved in the Effective altruism movement. Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy prosecuted for one of the biggest crypto frauds in a long time, was also a big proponent of it. I talk about that system—the name of the Scottish guy who invented it, William MacAskill. He came up with this system called QALYs, short for quality-adjusted life years. It’s a way of calculating how to do the most good with money. QALYs allow you to make a calculation that says if you invest a dollar here, it will do more good than investing a dollar there. Obviously, that’s very appealing to big business and anyone who likes to donate to charity in America because it’s tax-deductible. The whole system of donation is itself an industry—charity is itself an industry. What MacAskill proposed with QALYs was to make altruistic instincts effective, almost like an algorithm.

The problem is that you can use QALYs to justify anything. You can use it to compare the quality of life of someone who’s paraplegic with someone who’s blind, and you can make a choice there over whose care you invested; you know, that’s a very, very cold rational deterministic way of looking at things. It also led to things like Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud. You know, at his trial for this billion, billions, and billions of dollar fraud, he was still saying that he believed that his actions were justified because the profits would go to somewhere that would have been an effective altruist solution.

And it’s going to come into disrepute because not only have you got effective altruist societies buying mansions for themselves to throw events in, rather than actually investing the money. You also come to this situation where morally it’s okay to say it’s better to go and work as a Wall Street Trader and donate 80% of your income and live on the remains than it is to actually go and save lives in a country where doctors are needed. You know that once you do the math over how much the training costs, etc., that one is doing more good than another. There’s something that you lose in not doing good yourself, I think.

So Bostrom’s contribution to this is what’s called long-termism, the idea that downstream problems like rogue AI would affect many billions more people and be an order of magnitude more serious than the threats we face now, so we need to start long-range planning. There is the calculation of saying that the life of one person now is just not as valuable as the life of a billion people down the road. That’s a calculus that could easily let you get away with outrageous things in the here and now. I think that’s the risk of any kind of predictive system—it fixes your gaze so far into the future that you can lose all contact with the reality of here and now.

That’s why I go on in that chapter to talk about the model proposed by Harry Seldon in the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. While psychohistory was a system for predicting the rise and fall of empires over a galactic scale, it was also designed to ensure that humanity still had a history to survive into by preventing a great crash in the species. It was also an effort to preserve the culture, traditions, art, and aesthetics of the human race. Even though the project fails as a predictive mechanism and gets co-opted as an ideology and weapon, it still achieves its aim: the Foundation continues, and those traditions are preserved.

We have real-life examples of that. I write about the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. If you ever get a chance to go, it’s so good—all ancient texts, some from discredited ideas like Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and Christian demonology. Particularly the Jewish texts from a period when Amsterdam was known as a haven of tolerance, where Jews could live without fear of being killed and could start publishing houses. Menasseh Ben Israel and others in that publishing culture managed to preserve many traditions underpinning Jewish thought and tradition. If they hadn’t been able to do that, our understanding of Judaism and Jewish history would be different.

One of the things they sustained was Kabbalah, a discredited system, but one that preserved many major texts influencing how we understand the world today. Maybe you think along the same lines of Scientology in that there is a bit of a Kabbalah cult in Hollywood, or maybe people think of it more along the lines of Reiki, you know, like it’s just bullshit, woo-woo that josh sticks in the air type of thing. Nonetheless, it’s an important historical system. So, I think having the urge to preserve culture, to preserve traditions, to preserve ideas, religions, stories, all of these things I think are worth preserving.

And that was the best I could get as a message of hope at the end of the story, is that whatever happens, I just hope that there are still archivists among us, people who like to keep records and write down and tell stories.

One chapter that intrigued me was ‘Liminal City of the Spotless Brand’ which critiques the transformation of urban Spaces by corporate interests what do you think of the broader societal implications of these commercialised environments

Yeah, I think there’s a ton of consequences for them, and what I was trying to communicate there was the way that cities can just feel very unwelcoming and inhuman. That’s not just the fact that so much public space is being colonised by corporations; it’s also to do with the fact that capitalism tries to manage those spaces. You know, that’s particularly true in any city that needs redevelopment—is that redevelopment can really only be driven by investment from the private sector in the way that the societies that we’ve got at the moment are set up to run, particularly in the UK. So, you end up with these kind of corporate zones within a city that have no character because chain places—you know, whether you’re talking about a McDonald’s or whether you’re talking about Vinoteca—they’re very different ends of the scale in terms of what they serve and what the experience is like, but the idea is the same: to get you in, spend, get you to spend money, and then get you out.

Now, obviously, independent businesses—pubs run by independent people—they want you to come in and spend money too, but they’re also trying to create a particular atmosphere or an aesthetic, you know what I mean?

So, I think that’s what I was talking about—is the fact that they’ve become corporate zones in inner cities rather than places where people come to start a business and make money and create their own particular slice of it. And I think as well, it’s like there’s just a lack of novelty in a city like that, which I think can be quite depressing as a human being. We like to see the strange and the unusual, you know, most people, I think, like a little bit of variety. It’s very hard to find that in some cities, and I think, you know, there’s just a risk that because we do have so many cities where—you know, I live in a town where the level of investment in the city centre has been sorely lacking for years and years and years. My wife used to live here in the 1980s, and the high street was like a place where people would come together; there were good shops. Now it’s just all, you know, betting shops and vape shops and pound shops and that kind of stuff.

So, I think there is a general decay of our infrastructure in Britain but also of our kind of business infrastructure and our civic planning, and the solution always seems to be relying on applying money from private investment to solve those problems, whereas usually it brings problems with it. I think one of the things that killed the high street in our town is the fact we’ve got two big box supermarkets now, three. So, if you live here and you’ve got a bit of money to spend—as many people in this area do; it’s a lot richer than it was in the 1980s in terms of the earning, the income of people who live here—there are certainly some nice cars parked in the drive. All of that money is going to Lidl or Morrison’s or ASDA, and so there’s no need for a high street, no need for a Civic Centre because the people who have the money spend it in the big box stores and then drive back to their house.

The high street is, as I think I write in the book, populated by methadone ghosts and the derelict shells of shuttered Costa Coffees. That’s not acceptable. None of these corporations have a real stake in a city. If you seed the whole of a zone over to Starbucks and Zizzi and Morrison’s, what’s going to happen when nobody’s spending money in those places? They’re just going to shutter the shop. Whereas, you know, if somebody who had a business there was themselves a part of the infrastructure, a part of the city, then perhaps we’d be less inclined to go spend our money in those big box stores.

So, yet again, you know, I think what I was trying to say beyond analysing what it’s like to live in a place that is a place of no place, a place that’s just an empty logoscape, I also wanted to talk about the ways in which capitalism eats everything and it’s going to eat our cities too. It’s going to eat our culture. The particular city that I was writing about in that essay, I’m sure it does have culture under the surface; in fact, I know it did. I was in town in that particular city for a poetry festival, so I know for a fact that it has stuff going on. It’s just very, very hard to see, very, very hard to find, and probably very, very hard to access for most of the citizens that live in that city, if they even know that it exists.

So, that’s another thing that I mean by art can be resistance, is that at the moment, we don’t have a particularly large amount of very influential or well-known cultural or countercultural art, but that certainly wasn’t the case when I grew up. There were lots of countercultural aspects to the art that I consumed and the scenes that I was part of. I’d like to see a return to that, and one way I think that could happen is through the recolonisation of corporate space in the cities with art, with activities like skateboarding or face painting or clown displays or juggling. These are the kinds of things that we could do that would look not just like protest but like an actual reclaiming of space from corporations.

You know, I’ve seen a few people do things like that in the kind of area of protest. Like I had a friend who was an anarchist clown, and they would go and chain themselves dressed as clowns to petrol stations. It’s a good photo opportunity; it’s embarrassing for the police having to remove them; it’s embarrassing for the corporations to see clowns tied to their petrol pumps. So, it’s an effective method of protest, but I also think, you know, I really admire the Situationists from the 1960s. They were quite good at using art to disrupt the social fabric, to draw attention to real social issues. Faced with these faceless, liminal corporate cities, that’s maybe something that we could explore doing.

The Darkest Timeline is published in paperback by Revol Press. To support the work of Revol Press, order through Revolpress.com.

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